September 17, 2013

... As an honorably discharged veteran, he cleared a basic hurdle to receive a Defense Department security pass. Despite his being investigated by police departments in Seattle and Fort Worth, for firing a gun in anger, no charges were filed that would have shown up in his F.B.I. fingerprint file. .... Mr. Alexis was also twice investigated by other police departments in shooting episodes — once for firing through his ceiling in Fort Worth, Tex., and another time for shooting out a car’s tires in Seattle, during what he described as an anger-fueled blackout.

Can you really go around shooting other people's cars without having charges filed? I recall that Richard Pryor had charges filed against him for stopping his wife from leaving him by shooting out the tires and engine of her car. I remember this because my mom was chosen to be on Pryor's jury. (The case got postponed and her panel of jurors was dismissed.)

Pryor discusses killing the car from 2:15 to 3:40 in the video above. NSFW.

The Washington shooter also raised flags for Rhode Island police on another occasion, and was given his honorable discharge by the Navy despite a series of infractions. He got passes for illegal or otherwise aberrant behavior, and so dodged the paper trail that would have prevented him from getting a pass the next time around, and so on.

But even if he had gotten prosecuted for one of his previous crimes, although it might have kept him out of the DC Navy Yard, it wouldn't have necessarily prevented him from going on a killing spree elsewhere in the future. When so many Americans are bowling alone, there are more alienated men, and some non-zero percentage of them appear to be time bombs.

Early on the morning of February 7, Los Angeles police officers fired approximately 100 shots at a blue Toyota pickup truck in which Margie Carranza and her 71-year-old mother, Emma Hernandez, were delivering newspapers. The officers mistook their truck for the gray Nissan Titan Dorner was believed to be driving. Hernandez was hit and Carranza suffered injuries from flying glass. The officers were guarding the home of a high-ranking police official. The city of Los Angeles agreed to a $4.2 million settlement besides the initial $40,000 compensation for their truck.On the same morning, Torrance police opened fire on the truck of a surfer headed for the beach

Substitute Nidal Hasan's jihadism for Alexis's violent schizophrenia (or just plain violent misanthropy) and you have the same kind of individual committing mass murder, Because both of these men's repeatedly self-manifested violent proclivities were given no notice and were not documented by our Dear Rulers' various irresponsible "No See Islam" and "Non-Whites are sacred cows who get special breaks" commissariats, whose actual purpose is not to keep us Americans safe, but instead to allow our Dear Rulers to rule us by anarcho-tyranny.

That may, or may not, be so, but one should be forgiven for considering it to form at least part of the explanation for why Hasan, Alexis, the Tsarnaev brothers, et al. have - supposedly - "just slipped through the cracks."

...The consequence of this reality is that black students are excluded from much of the STEM conversation and are nearly entirely excluded from the higher level STEM education discourse. For the incoming 2013 freshman class of first time full time freshmen at Georgia Tech, for example, there were only 61 applicants from the entire Atlanta Public School system, nearly 2,500 seniors. Of those 61 applicants, 26 were admitted and 15 have enrolled...

Not all Honorable Discharges are the same. You can be pretty screwed up and get a Honorable Discharge as long as you don't do something that is worth going through the hassle of court marshalling you or other official action.

A way to distinguish Honorable Discharges is to look at the reenlistment code. Depending on what military thinks of you they will give you a reenlistment code authorizing you to reenlist, or reenlist with wavers or not reenlist at all. Its not always accurate but its more accurate then just a HD

Perhaps he'll get the sympathetic Omar Thornton treatment where he gets portrayed as someone who snapped under the weight of an unjust situation. His claim that he had PTSD due to having been in the vicinity of the 9-11 aftermath could be spun into him having been a brave heroic rescuer although it was probably really an attempt on his part to scam a disability check.

As the New York radio personality Bob Grant would put it, Alexis has a "protective skin coloring" that saves him from accusations that would undo a white person. Even more, he was a black IT guy, fer chris' sakes. You know how rare that is? You know how desired by government IT contractors that is?

Which makes his whole discrimination boo-hoo even more absurd. The guy would have instantly jumped to the front of the line at any job opportunity.

This Alexis case and a St. Louis black mass shooter from six years ago, Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, will be found out to be very similar.

Thornton did nothing but whine and moan about racism and all the discrimination he suffered, all the while the people who were “discriminating” against him were doing nothing but pandering to him, groveling to him and giving him most of what he wanted. The more they pandered, the more he whined, which in turn drove a vicious dynamo of white pandering and black whining, until he stopped it in a hail of bullets against the very hands that fed him.

The evidence that has come out about Alexis has so far validated my theory.

To the first anonymous poster above -- If the left can't find a way to spin this to their political advantage, it iwll go down the rabbit hole.

Maybe its my own fault because I watch television improperly. I work in my home office but I have the TV on in the kitchen tuned to Fox News. Medical science this month thinks we should drink more coffee so I go into the kitchen to make myself another cappuccino every hour or two. At these times I learn the events of the day.

I learned quite clearly that there were three shooters. At my second cup there were only two. It took three cups to arrive at one shooter.

But I never heard that his discharge was honorable. I had heard snatches of considerable on-air pundit mutterings about how he had had only a general discharge. It was not till today that I read in your blog about his honorable status.

Since it is now demonstrated that I have to rely on your blog for hard facts as well as interpretive opinion would you please tell me what the hell happened in Benghazi?

That may, or may not, be so, but one should be forgiven for considering it to form at least part of the explanation for why Hasan, Alexis, the Tsarnaev brothers, et al. have - supposedly -"just slipped through the cracks."

As General Casey said, "... And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

Actually, oddly enough, I made my own Richard Pryor connection to this shooting.

"This reminds me of Steven Pinker’s treatment of the matter in his book The Blank Slate. He referenced a stand-up routine from Richard Pryor on the matter (from Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip):"

But it seems to me that Alexis may have been losing his mind, for real, and really may not have been responsible for his actions. That gives him a pass that few deserve, including most of the people who commit mass murder.

It also puts the responsibility on the people around him.

Were people afraid to identify his craziness and label it for what it was because of his race? Let's see.

I think that we have become so sensitive to the thought of putting sane people away, or the "horrors" of involuntary commitment that we end up hurting the insane by denying them the help they desperately need.

There are people who shouldn't be out here. The government keeps looking at the cost of helping them and refuses to pay it.

Let's see what comes out this. I hope we can learn something and prevent future incidents.

That guy was my neighbor when he first went on a shooting spree -- he lived down the street from me. Amazing. It never made the news as far as I know. My guess is that he wasn't prosecuted because someone was reluctant to testify.

A lot of cases are dismissed because people just don't want to bother/get involved. It's actually a social capital thing.

As a case in point, when I lived in that neighborhood a woman approached my door saying she needed help because someone carjacked her and her baby was in the car. After checking all the windows to forestall a possible home invasion and arming myself with a .45, I let her in and gave her my phone to call the cops.

Her story did indeed check out, but it came out that nobody else had opened a door for her, and I don't blame them. This is common in diverse neighborhoods. People just don't want to get involved in that stuff, and I'm certain that's why the guy wasn't charged when he shot out some tires on Seattle's Beacon Hill back in '04.

Feeling pretty well ensconced in middle age, I was surprised to notice that none of the victims (at least the deceased) were younger than me. What gives? Is it a statistical fluke, slow reflexes, or just a reasonably representative sample of this particular slice of the government labor force?

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